Cal State Prof. Suffered Broken Arm After Clashing With Police

A 73-year-old Cal State Northridge professor suffered a broken arm after clashing with police at Thursday night's demonstration near campus that was organized to protest state education cuts.

The campus newspaper, the Daily Sundial, reports that associate professor of sociology and American Indian studies Karren Baird-Olson suffered a broken arm and other injuries as protesters and police clashed along a skirmish line at Reseda Boulevard and Prairie Street. She was arrested and hospitalized, according to the paper. A YouTube video (after the jump) purports to show Los Angeles police and perhaps California Highway Patrol officers as the aggressors, but it's hard to decipher exactly what happened before the gray-haired professor went down.

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Students involved in the protest denounced the use of force by police, stating they were simply there to exercise their freedom of speech.

Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Kirk Albanese told the paper, " ... We teach students the wrong thing when we allow them to take over a street without a permit ... We didn't want to have to wrestle with a bunch of kids. It's not good for them. It's not good for us."

Dennis Romero is an L.A. Weekly staff writer. He formerly worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Los Angeles Times, where he participated in Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the L.A. riots. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone online, the Guardian and, as a young stringer, the New York Times.